Well I got the car to the service place yesterday morning to get the smoke looked at, and the guy said he was 99% sure what it was, blah blah blah stuff I can’t remember, it’ll be about $600-650 to fix.

Dammit.

I ummed and ahhed for a few minutes. On the one hand, I’d like nothing better to do than to offload the car ASAP and get something nicer, and I don’t want to spend up big on repairs on a car that’s worth bugger-all. On the other hand, realistically it ain’t gonna happen tomorrow, so I need this car to keep running, and obviously I can’t have it putting out smoke like it’s been doing.

Especially not with a PTUA sticker on the back bumper.

I could keep feeding it oil (the smoke is from oil burning off), but he said that would have other consequences.

So I told him to go ahead and do it. Nothing else I could do. It ended up being $634.

Interestingly, a search of Drive shows Magna sedans from that vintage on sale for $1950 to $3999, so while it’s not worth much, it’s maybe slightly more than bugger-all. But given most of those are dealer sales, any money I’d get is probably not that much more than today’s repairs cost me.

Still, at least I can offload it before the 220K service, which I was told will be a biggie… though yesterday’s work covered some of that.

So… anybody want to buy a car?

PS. 10am On school run this morning, steam coming out of bonnet. Ring car place, go to car place, they look. Radiator cracked. Estimated cost $150 - blarrrrgh!

PPS. 11pm. Actual cost $287!!!

Yay. My cluster headaches have gone away, for now, even after having gone off the medication. Something to watch out for next spring, as I suspect they’ll re-appear then.

Funny thing is I had suspected the medication would impede my ability to donate blood. I rang the blood bank and they said no, it’s fine, come on in for your appointment. Moments after hanging up, I remembered I wouldn’t be able to go to my appointment anyway because something else important had cropped up at exactly the same time. I pondered ringing back, but decided it would look like I was trying too hard to weasel my way out of it. I’ll just have to give double next time. (Not!)

Boo! My bottle of hair stuff I like from Aveda ran out, and I went to get more. (I wonder if that post from 2004 was really the last time I bought it? Nah, there must have been another one in the meantime.) It’s been discontinued. But curiously, the guy there said it’ll be back “sometime this year”. Odd. He sold me some other stuff, which I bet isn’t as good. Grumble.

Shell emailed pointing out an old entry from 2001, in which I sent an SMS for the first time. Pretty funny stuff, and I wonder what other old posts of mine might highlight the arrival of technologies that we now take for granted.

Hmmm… the first time I mentioned Google was in 2001. I remember using AltaVista a lot in the 90s, but evidently found no reason to write about it. It wasn’t until 2006 that I finally (permanently) got a camera phone — well behind the pack there, though I had dabbled previously. I first got broadband internet in 2000.

My car is smokin’. But not in a good way.

It’s just coming up to ten years since I first got it. And it’s a ‘93 model, so sometime later this year will be the car’s fifteenth birthday.

There’s a strange rattling noise when I start it up (rumoured to be an issue with the balance shaft chain — whatever that is), and worse, it’s putting some smoke out of the exhaust when idling, or accelerating from a stop. This isn’t a good look for anybody, let alone me.

It’s going for a service pronto, but I wonder (yet again) if the old beast may be reaching the end of its useful life. While I drive about a third of the Australian average of 15,000 km per year, it’s no good if it’s polluting more than it should.

PT is just not up to scratch for some trips for now, and the car sharing companies aren’t even considering the burbs like mine yet. And while I should make more trips by bike, it ain’t gonna happen just yet. And the theory of doing any necessary car trips by taxi isn’t as good as the reality.

So I think it may be about time to upgrade the ol’ rustbucket.

Last time I pondered this lots of helpful people commented. So once again, I’m pondering Corollas, Golfs, Civics, Vectras, Peugot 307s, that kind of thing. Safe (4 stars or higher?), economical, trouble-free.

Sigh. Damn expensive business though, isn’t it.

Cars. Money pits.

Now I’ve seen everything. On the 8:05pm to Werribee last night…

PS. Sunday 7:45pm. Post title modified. Yes, he was a real hairdresser.

Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever.

Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD.

OK. I was talking last week about not renewing with the RACV. As it happens my renewal form just arrived, and my membership runs out in a few weeks, so I’ll start shopping. Ultratune is looking pretty good (thanks Peter).

Ah, emails. Do we all know the danger of hitting Reply All instead of Reply? Will Joanna Purdy be the next Claire Swire? Or maybe this one won’t snowball. (I’m too polite to forward it around.)

PS. Sorry, a server glitch (well, actually an upgrade I forgot was happening) has (hopefully temporarily) lost a couple of comments on this post.

Even before the ABC switched over to the ABC1 branding to help emphasise ABC2, I had started shopping for a digital Set Top Box to get the new channels. I’ve been able to sample them through the TV tuner in the computer, but of course watching on the big screen* from the couch is always more comfortable.

Originally the plan had been to buy a plain ol’ standard definition STB, until the new High Definition second channels of the 7 and 10 networks had started up. Now it would appear to make sense to buy an HD unit instead, getting me a total of 3 extra fully-fledged channels: ABC2, 10HD and SBS Digital (though given the latter is wall-to-wall foreign language world news, my chances of understanding any of it is minimal). Plus 7HD, which has a few bits and bobs of different programming.

The question now is, should I jump in and buy an HD STB, or buy a box that also does recording to a hard drive? Indeed, what about a dual-tuner unit so I can record two channels at once (occasionally useful during media storms when I wish to stoke my ego). Those Topfield boxes are meant to be pretty good — though it looks like only the high-end (expensive) model includes an HD tuner.

Or should I go completely over-the-top and wait for the Australian launch of TiVo, rumoured to be coming up before the Olympics in August? Monthly fees attached though, so not free.

Decisions, decisions.

Not that I watch a lot of TV, but on the occasions I do flick it on, it’d be nice to have more options.

*OK, my TV is just a 68cm 4:3 CRT model, but to me it’s still big. I don’t want any bigger.

I nipped briefly out for a quick hot choccie with my valentine, with a wrapped box of chocolates and a card in an envelope.

I returned with an unwrapped box of chocolates and a card in an envelope.

They weren’t the same ones, honest. That would be a bit sad and tragic, wouldn’t it.

No, it seems we just thought alike.

I think one of the reasons I’m so pleased the apology is that it’s so rare for politicians to admit that they (individually or collectively) were wrong. That alone makes it a historic day.

Furthermore, we’ve got a lot of reasons to be proud of our country, and it seems only right that we should also recognise its failings. Being able to do so is a reason to be proud.

Given I was on the move at Apology Hour (9am), I tried to listen in on the radio, using my mobile phone, which unfortunately only gets FM stations. I thought Triple J was going to be carrying it… instead I found a news bulletin, followed by music. (Their web page said “from 10am” — WTF?) So I flicked around and found I had just missed it on Nova, and their hosts were talking about how moving it had been. Dammit.

In the I settled for TripleM, who played From Little Things, Big Things Grow by Paul Kelly (played later in the day outside Parliament by …was it Kev Carmody with John Butler?), then Treaty by Yothu Yindi. And then Jump by Van Halen. Ummmm… okay. I switched off at that point, and listened and watched later.

But no matter, the important thing was it happened. And it’s great to see so many people getting behind it.

• Download the apology, and Kevin Rudd’s speech
• Paul Keating’s Redfern speech, 10th December, 1992, which helped us get down this road
• Paul Kelly: Special Treatment

PS. Brendan Nelson is a goose.